Assessing Student Work

n 1911, researchers testing the reliability of the marks entered on these cards showed that the same material could be assigned widely different marks depending on the markers. However, the research findings changed nothing because the graded report card had taken firm root.

From 1911 to 1960, school systems experimented with various letter and number reporting conventions. Percentage grading was the most popular system during the latter half of the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries. In this system, the teacher assigned each student a number between 0 and 100, the number supposedly reflecting the percentage of the material the student had learned

Grading of any sort is a relatively modern innovation. Yale may have been the first university in the United States to issue grades, with students in 1785 receiving the Latin equivalents of best, worse, and worst. Prior to that time, U.S. colleges employed the Oxford and Cambridge model, in which students attended regular lectures and engaged in a weekly colloquy with their proctor, in writing and in person.

It's no coincidence that a single system was in place by the early 20th century. Schools at the time were bursting at the seams, given the sudden increases in immigration and the rise of compulsory attendance laws.

In the years from 1911 to 1960, school systems experimented with various letter and number reporting conventions. Percentage grading was the most popular system during the latter half of the 19th and the early part of the 20th century. In that system, the teacher assigned each student a number between 0 and 100 supposedly reflecting the percentage of the material that the student had learned. T

One well-known system, which evenly distributes the grades on either side of a bell-shaped curve, would automatically fail a certain proportion of any given group—even in a group composed of known high achievers. Research has shown that rigid adherence to such practices can be very damaging to students.

1800 AD. Then came William Farish

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people.

Grades didn't give students deeper insights into their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject matter.

Ideally, we want children to understand that they are always learners. In school, we refer to them as "students" but outside of school, as children, they are still learners. So it makes no sense to even advertise a "no homework" policy in a school. It sends the wrong message. The policy should be, "No time-wasting, rote, repetitive tasks will be assigned that lack clear instructional or learning purposes."

Couldn’t the rigor of so-called high-level verbs be compromised by a simplistic task and scoring system? Vice versa: can’t we imagine some of the low-level verbs occurring in highly-challenging and rigorous assessments? (e.g. Who, what, when, and why in a complex journalism case would be rigorous work.)

In summary, just throwing some verbs around as starters for “rigorous” tasks is not enough to address the first bullet concerning the challenge of the task. Rigorous tasks are a function of cognitive demand and situational complexity, not just the verb used. Self-assess against our audit matrix to test your tests, therefore: